“Not entirely,” Reid said. “What did her panties look like?”
“Black. Lacy edge.” As he said the words, Harris tickled his own neck, then made a finger slash, as if cutting his throat. He shivered and tried to hold back a smile. “They matched her bra.”
Reid pictured the crime scene as if he were there right now. Beth on her side; that bruised lace-imprinted line around her neck; her black panties and bra, the French lace torn to shreds, lying on the floor.
No one who had not been in that room, or read the police reports, knew those details. Reid’s heart was slamming in his chest, and his mouth was dry.
“You were there,” Reid said.
“No! I told you. I just dreamed about it!”
Reid picked up the postcard and looked at the way Harris had written Pete’s name next to his own, almost like doodling the name of a crush. Reid knew that criminals, especially those with paraphilic disorders, loved to communicate with each other, relive their crimes and share fantasies.
“I’m really curious about why you wrote Pete’s name right next to yours. I know you say you dreamed about him, but to me it seems like more than that, Martin. To me it seems as if you and Pete did something together. Or maybe he told you about whathedid.”
“Yes!” Harris said, looking almost triumphant, as if Reid finally got it. “That’s exactly it! In the dream he told me. He showed me! I saw it all! That’s what I mean by wanting to help you solve the crime. That’s why I put his name and Beth’s with the list of, you know.”
“The women you assaulted,” Reid said in a calm voice.
“Well, yes. Because even though I don’t do that anymore, have no desire whatsoever to do that again, I understand people who do. That’s why I dreamed of Pete. I don’t want to sound like I admire him—honestly, I don’t. But I can get right into his skin and feel how he hurt his wife and then killed her.”
Honestly.
“Let’s get a written statement on that,” Reid said.
“So you believe me?” Harris said.
Reid stared at him. He believed that Martin Harris had either killed Beth or spoken to the killer, who had given him very specific details. He saw the hopefulness in Harris’s eyes. Reid was happy to dash it.
“The problem, Martin, is that I don’t believe in dreams,” Reid said. And he left the interview room, the Black Hall postcard in his hand.
29
Her phone buzzed, and Kate glanced at the screen. It was Lulu, calling for the third time since Kate had left the soup kitchen. Scotty had obviously raised the alarm. Again, Kate let it go to voice mail. In the midday sun, she walked from downtown New London past Fort Trumbull to Pequot Avenue.
Nothing revealed a person’s character like the poetics of loss. Beth’s death had revealed the dark sides of people she’d loved and trusted. Kate had felt guilty for not telling Lulu about the sketch, but the way she and Scotty had known everything and kept Beth’s secret felt like a much worse betrayal. Even deeper than that, Beth herself had chosen to keep it from Kate.
When Kate got to Monte Cristo Cottage, the boyhood home of Eugene O’Neill, she slowed down. The Victorian house was up a slight rise from the street, and she sat on the wall along the sidewalk and faced the harbor. There was barely a breeze; two boats with sails futilely raised motored toward the Sound, looking for wind. She felt a presence behind her—not a person, but the cottage itself. O’Neill’s father had been an actor, the house named for his most famous role, the Count of Monte Cristo. It had been the setting for O’Neill’s playLong Day’s Journey into Night.
When Kate was a senior in high school, Mathilda had taken her and Beth to see the brilliant production in New York at the Plymouth Theater, with Vanessa Redgrave and Brian Dennehy starring as Mary and James Tyrone, Philip Seymour Hoffman as Jamie, and Robert Sean Leonard as Edmund—O’Neill’s autobiographical character.
The play had hit Kate hard. It was about a Connecticut family so full of love for each other yet tormented with addiction and sinking with secrets. Mary was a morphine addict, James a liar, Jamie an alcoholic, Edmund dying of consumption. She’d thought of her own family, of how happy she had thought they were. In some ways, they were completely different from the Tyrones. Her family didn’t suffer from addiction or alcoholism. No one had a fatal disease. Instead of two sons, there were two daughters.
Her father had not been a drunk, but he had been a liar and a cheat. He had acted the role of good husband and father but was actually a different person entirely.
When they saw the play, her mother had been dead barely a year. It was only in retrospect, after her mother’s death and father’s imprisonment, after Beth’s retreat from closeness, and after Kate’s own heart became concretized, that she realized how her father’s secrets had destroyed them. He had had a private life unknown to the family.
He was so charming. Even Kate was charmed by him, only back then she had called it love. She had adored her dad—he could do no wrong. Even though he stayed out lots of nights, and her mother seemed upset about it, Kate figured he deserved to have fun. He worked hard at the gallery that had belonged to her mother and grandmother, built it into an even more successful business because of all the collectors he befriended. Everyone wanted him to like them.
He loved to gamble. Even on family vacations, they would often go to places that had casinos—like the trip to Monte Carlo the summer Kate was thirteen. The excuse had been to visit the Jean Cocteau murals in Villefranche-sur-Mer, to stay in Saint Paul de Vence, the medieval village above Nice, and to dine at La Colombe d’Or. Legend had it that artists had paid for their meals with paintings. The walls were hung with art by Matisse, Léger, Picasso, Chagall. But the way her father had driven them back to the auberge; kissed them all good night, saying it was “for luck”; and left for the rest of the night, Kate knew he was speeding back to the casino.
“What’s he doing there?” Kate asked her mother.
“He enjoys games,” her mother said.
“What kind of games?” Kate asked.
Her mother laughed. “Why don’t you ask him that?”
